"Vince Virgilio" <blueschi at gmail.com> wrote in message
news:dc4sgq$11r$1 at smc.vnet.net...
>
> Hello David,
>
> I think Mathematica uses the ATLAS (Automatically Tuned Linear
> Algebra
> System) libraries for a significant amount of its linear algebra.
> And
> I think ATLAS has a compile-time option to enabled threading. This
> might be what Wolfram Inc. means by "multicore" support.
>
> Corrections welcome.
>
> Vince Virgilio
>
But certainly one can have threaded libraries on a single core system.
This has been the case for many years now. One can get some advantages
by running threaded apps even on a single CPU, depending on the nature
of the app. The only difference with multi-core is that one would get
true concurrent executions of threads, which should results in much
better theoretical performance advantages, everything else being
equal. While on single core cpu the threads of course will have to
take turns running on the single cpu.
i.e. on a single core, concurrent executions of threads is
illusionary, but still can be more efficient than otherwise, while on
multiple-core it is real.
The point is that, if there is such a flag on these ATLAS libraries,
it could been turned on without the multiple-core being there. After
all, one can install and run Mathematica 5.2 perbuild binaries on
single core systems as is.
Nasser